I read this while enjoying a piece of cherry pie and a cup of damn good black coffee after installing my silent drape runners. And lemme tell you abouI read this while enjoying a piece of cherry pie and a cup of damn good black coffee after installing my silent drape runners. And lemme tell you about this crazy dream I had last night. I was in this room with red curtains….

OK, those are the obvious references, but I’m new to Twin Peaks fandom so cut me some slack. Honestly, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by David Lynch’s work, but I struggled mightily with it because I’m the kind of person who needs the story to make some kind of sense at the end of the day. So Lynchian style dream logic just isn’t my bag.

Or at least it didn’t used to be until all the hype about the return of Twin Peaks got my curiosity up enough to finally work my way through the two seasons of the original show after and the prequel movie Fire Walk With Me. Something clicked for me this time with the whole story about the murder of high school girl in this weird town even if that second season is a real slog at times. And I was utterly transfixed and mesmerized with the return to it over 25 years later. So that’s how I ended up reading this, and as you’d expect from show co-creator Mark Frost even a tie-in book couldn’t be simple.

This came out before the return of the show, and it’s obviously meant to fill in some gaps and lay groundwork. The concept is that what we’re reading is a file compiled by a mysterious archivist who proceeds to link the town of Twin Peaks and the stories of some of its residents to a vast conspiracy that stretches back to the days of the Lewis and Clark expedition. In fact, it’s like a Grand Unified Theory of Conspiracy Theories that includes pretty much everything from Freemasons to Roswell to the JFK assassination along with references to real people like Thomas Jefferson, Richard Nixon, and L. Ron Hubbard.

The impressive thing here is how well this is done so that it actually doesn’t seem that batshit crazy if you’ve seen the show. The structure is particularly interesting in that it’s an epistolary novel using a variety of sources ranging from newspaper accounts to top secret government documents with notes from the archivist which connect the dots. Another layer to this is that we’re actually supposed to be reading this as a report from a FBI agent (One who becomes a character in the new season.) who is vetting the file and adding her own comments and notes to what the archivist is saying as well as trying to figure out his identity.

If you were only reading this to get questions answered from the show then it might be frustrating because while there are sections that deal with the familiar characters a great deal is just about this wide ranging conspiracy about UFOs. Sort of.

The main link is that we learn that a minor character from the original run of the show actually had a whole secret life tied into this vast conspiracy which also connects it all back to the town and its citizens. By the end it all comes full circle so that it makes sense. (Or as much sense as anything in Twin Peaks ever does.) It was probably slightly confusing to anyone who hadn’t seen the last season before reading, but as a companion piece to the entire show I found it extremely compelling.

One thing that I’m scratching my head over is that it seems to have some monumental continuity errors. Especially in the story of how Big Ed lost his true love Norma and ended up marrying crazy Nadine instead. Again, I’m no expert, but this seems wildly different then the story Big Ed told on the show back in the day.

On the other hand, the tale this time is being relayed by another character, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Frost wasn’t doing something tricky here that’s a commentary on how history changes depending on who’s telling it which would be a sly wink as to how much we can trust anything that’s in this book. Or maybe he just screwed up. It’s Twin Peaks so we’ll probably never know for sure, but that’s part of what makes it all so intriguing....more

As Adam Warlock and Thanos try to stop his good feminine side, the Goddess, from saving the universe by destroying it, a bunch of Marvel superheroes eAs Adam Warlock and Thanos try to stop his good feminine side, the Goddess, from saving the universe by destroying it, a bunch of Marvel superheroes end up fighting their fellow good guys who are in the Goddess’ thrall.

This isn’t bad as far as crossovers went, but as with the The Infinity Gauntlet and The Infinity War this is really a story about Adam Warlock and Thanos with the other folks like Wolverine and Spider-Man just here to sell books so those characters feel kind of shoehorned in. At least this one does a better job of working them into the story and giving them something to do.

Reading these old early ‘90s crossovers is also like a time capsule that reminds you of crazy random things that happened in Marvel’s past like Sue Storm wearing an incredibly skimpy version of her costume. It’s also funny how you’ll see characters that they were desperately trying to turn into the Next Big Thing but who I’d forgotten all about. I don’t think we’ll be seeing MCU films or Netflix shows about Darkhawk, Night Thrasher, or Windshear any time soon....more

Adam Warlock’s supposedly good feminine side manifests as a separate being who promptly networks a bunch of cosmic cubes to gain nearly unlimited poweAdam Warlock’s supposedly good feminine side manifests as a separate being who promptly networks a bunch of cosmic cubes to gain nearly unlimited power and declares herself the Goddess. She also gets a whole bunch of superheroes to join her cause to purge the universe of evil. Sounds OK in theory, but turning a bunch of super beings into religious zealots in service to a leader whose ultimate goal is to bring about the Rapture has some serious downside.

The remaining good guys try to figure out what the Goddess’ plan is. Meanwhile, Adam Warlock is working his own angles to try and stop this aspect of himself, and his plan involves Thanos. I’m sure that will work out just fine…

As big crossovers go this one is far from the worst, and Starlin came up with plots that were epic in scope for all of the Infinity stories of the early ‘90s. However, this really should have been boiled down to just having the six Infinity Crusade issues in one collection instead of including issues of Warlock & the Infinity Watch and The Warlock Chronicles because they don’t add much except for giving Marvel the excuse to sell two trade paperbacks instead of one....more

Two strangers meet at a small town bar. One is a sexy and mysterious redhead. The other is a handsome man who says he’s just passing through. That’s eTwo strangers meet at a small town bar. One is a sexy and mysterious redhead. The other is a handsome man who says he’s just passing through. That’s either the set-up to a dirty joke or the start of a noir novel.

I’ve been meaning to read Laura Lippman for a while now, and this one was right up my alley. I don’t want to say too much about the story because I think it’s one of those that the less you know the better going in. Suffice it to say that there’s plenty of twists and turns with both the main characters, Polly and Adam, hiding their own secrets and spending a lot of time wondering if they can trust the other even as neither of them can resist the attraction they have.

The plot is exceedingly clever with a James Cain feel to it, and that’s obviously deliberate since he’s even referenced. It’s one of those books where even the reader feels unsure of their footing as you’re constantly reevaluating each of them as new revelations come out. It’s also interesting that there’s actually very little action within the book. Most of what would be considered ‘the exciting parts’ happen before the book begins, and the biggest event that occurs essentially takes place between chapters. We don’t even know the truth about that until the end. In fact, a great deal of this just takes place in the heads of the people as they think about their secrets and suspicions even as they go about the routines they fall into over the course of the story.

That’s where the character work shines, and Lippmann shows a real flair at walking the line of leaving a reader unsure of what to think of both of them. Is one the victim and one the villain? Are they both villains? Both victims? What’s great is that the more you learn the less sure you’ll be about making any judgments about either one of them....more

I'm from Kansas, but I think I may have developed a New York accent after reading this book.

AI received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.

I'm from Kansas, but I think I may have developed a New York accent after reading this book.

Amy is a young lady living modestly in her Brooklyn neighborhood, but she used to be a hard partying Manhattan bartender. After her girlfriend dumped her Amy shed most of her once beloved vintage clothes and records and became a regular church goer who lives in a basement apartment. One of her volunteer jobs for the church is giving communion to elderly shut-ins, and one woman that Amy visits complains that her usual caretaker hasn’t been around in days but instead sent her son, Vincent, instead. Vincent has been barging in with the key and going into the old woman’s bedroom even though she asked him not, too.

When Vincent shows up Amy confronts him which makes him angry, but he leaves. Amy is worried that he might come back and that he may have have done something to his mother so she follows him around the neighborhood. Haunted by a homicide she witnessed as a teen that she was threatened into keeping quiet about, Amy continues to shadow Vincent until she witnesses a murder which triggers an odd reaction to it that kicks off a chain of events that involve several people.

I’m surprised how much I liked this book considering that it’s loaded with one of my pet peeves, a plot that depends on the main character regularly acting like an idiot. However, that usually bugs me because too often it’s just a lazy way to make things happen in a thriller, but this is one of those books that is either a character drama with some crime in it or a crime novel driven by the character drama in it. (Six of one, half-a-dozen of another.)

So it works here mainly because Amy is such an interesting and complex person. She knows she’s behaving irrationally at times, but she’s driven by both compulsions related to the old crime she witnessed as well as reexamining her life as she wonders who she really is. Adding to her confusion is the reappearance of the father who abandoned her as a child.

The other strong point is just how thoroughly William Boyle develops the Brooklyn that Amy lives in. There’s such a strong sense of place here that the neighborhood comes to feel like another vivid character, and yet it’s realistic and not sentimental. It’s so well done that you can do Google Street View along with Amy’s movement and see many of the locations mentioned in the book and they look exactly as described.

If you’re interested in a complex character study that uses a crime as a launching point then this fits the bill. Also, I didn’t realize this while reading but have since learned that this functions as a follow-up to Boyle’s Gravesend so now I’m adding that one to the to-read pile....more

Down these mean streets a man must go. Or to be more accurate in the case of Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin – down these mean streets a man must limp.

It’s 19Down these mean streets a man must go. Or to be more accurate in the case of Sammy ‘Two Toes’ Tiffin – down these mean streets a man must limp.

It’s 1947 in San Francisco where Sammy is a good guy with some skeletons in his closet who works as a bartender which is how he meets a beautiful blonde named Stilton, a/k/a the Cheese. As far as Sammy is concerned the Cheese stands alone, and he falls for her instantly. Unfortunately, his attempts at romance are hindered by his sleazy boss insisting that he procure some women for an Air Force general who wants to take them into the woods to provide entertainment for an elite club made up of influential men. Sammy is also working on get-rich-quick scheme that involves selling a deadly snake, there’s a racist cop causing trouble, and the news has reports about a strange incident in Roswell, New Mexico.

Since this was Christopher Moore writing a book called Noir I wasn’t expecting it to be James Cain or Jim Thompson. However, I was kind of hoping that he might stretch himself a little and be a bit less Christopher Moore. That's why I ultimately found this kind of disappointing because he gives it a try at first, but quickly throws it out the window to just write what he always does.

That’s the shame of it because the first couple of chapters do come across as Moore actually satirizing a noir novel with overblown pulpy language and a bunch of really solid jokes based on the concept. If he’d have stuck with that and resisted the urge to just do his usual thing of introducing the weird and/or supernatural he might have really had something. But then we get to the stuff about the aliens, and while it’s still got some laughs, it’s also a formula that Moore has done in pretty much every book.

I also found the shifting POV to be problematic. We start off with Sammy in the first person which lets him do the parody of the classic hard boiled crime novel which I wanted more of. But then Moore shifts to a third person narration which we later find out is coming from a very unlikely source. So the book starts off with this distinct voice which I was into, but when it shifts into something else which is when it becomes standard Moore. Then he tries to go back to first person Sammy telling the story, but he’d lost the tone of what he started with. Which was what I liked best and wanted more of.

It’s not a complete waste of time. Moore is just inherently funny and there are a lot of solid gags and lines that made me chuckle. But I wish he’d managed to actually write a noir parody instead of just doing the thing that comes easiest to him. If he wanted to write something in this time period and have aliens in it then why not do a pulpy '50s sci-fi kind of thing rather than claiming in the title that it's going to be a genre that it has almost nothing to do with?...more

Absolutely nothing except for comic book crossovers and as the climactic film in a cinematic universe.

If you’re one of thoseWAR! What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing except for comic book crossovers and as the climactic film in a cinematic universe.

If you’re one of those folks who like the Marvel movies but haven’t read the comics then you might think that this would be the basis for the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War movie. However, it seems Infinity Gauntlet, the first in this set of big event stories based around the Infinity Stones, will be the template the movie works off of. This is actually the sequel to that.

Confusing, isn’t it?

This is fairly decent as Marvel’s big cosmic crossovers go. This time Thanos is kinda sorta a good guy who is helping Adam Warlock and the Infinity Watch try to stop the Magus from essentially becoming god by getting his hands on that bedazzled glove. Earth’s superheroes are also pawns in Magus’ game while Dr. Doom and Kang the Conqueror make for some interesting wildcards.

Overall the story is pretty ambitious with some decent layers to it. However, the superheroes really don’t serve any purpose other than as selling points to put on the covers. That’s the problem when there’s a threat this powerful. What’s Daredevil supposed to do against an enemy that can defeat Galactus without breaking a sweat? So they mostly end up in a side plot where they fight evil versions of themselves created by Magus as a distraction while the real action is centered on characters like Thanos and Adam Warlock.

Unfortunately, giant crossovers that involve every character in the Marvel universe whether it makes story sense or not would become the norm in the 25 years since this came out....more

When you ask Parker for a loan you’d better make sure that he agrees with the terms or else he’ll really make you pay.

It’s not unusual for Parker’s aWhen you ask Parker for a loan you’d better make sure that he agrees with the terms or else he’ll really make you pay.

It’s not unusual for Parker’s accomplices to try to rip him off after they pull a robbery, but this one plays out differently from the typical stab in the back. Instead of just trying to kill him and take all the loot these guys first try to talk Parker into coming in with them and using all the money they just stole to finance their next job which they claim will be a highly lucrative jewel heist in Palm Beach. It’s only when Parker refuses and demands his cut that these guys reluctantly take all the money, but they promise that it’s only a loan which they will repay as soon as they complete this other robbery. It’s all very civilized as far as ripping off a partner goes, but of course they didn’t realize that they’re messing with the wrong guy. Parker promptly starts building a fake identity as a rich guy looking to buy a house in Palm Beach as part of his revenge scheme. He’s got a solid plan, but as usual things never run smoothly for Parker.

A plot about Parker being betrayed by his partners and setting out to get his money back is pretty standard for the series, and it’s all done as well as you’d expect from Richard Stark (a/k/a Donald Westlake). As a Parker novel this is a solid 3 stars, but there’s two things that I found absolutely delightful in this book.

First, Parker’s share of the original score is $20,000. He doesn’t want to throw in with the jewel heist and potentially make a lot more because he doesn’t like about the plan. After the other thieves take the money Parker then goes on a crime spree to build up the funds he’ll need to establish a whole new identity as a rich man. During this he probably makes well over $200,000 in a string of quick robberies. The fact that he is so peeved about losing 20 grand that he makes over 10 times that amount without breaking a sweat and still feels the need to use it to go after the guys who ripped him off rather than just take that money and call it a day is quintessential Parker, and I love it.

The second thing that I gave this one bonus points for is a scene that occurs while Parker is playing the part of a wealthy man looking to buy a house, and he has a real estate lady showing him around Palm Beach. This woman talks a ton of trash about a certain orange shitbag buying an estate there including this gem: "I think a place must be a little déclassé if Donald Trump has even heard of it."

Donald Westlake was so cool he can throw shade from beyond the grave....more

It’s hard to be a black sheep in a family of thieves and swindlers, but Collie Rand managed to pull it off by going on a murder spree during which heIt’s hard to be a black sheep in a family of thieves and swindlers, but Collie Rand managed to pull it off by going on a murder spree during which he killed several innocent people including a child.

Terrier Rand couldn’t cope with what his brother did and took off for five years, but with the execution date approaching he reluctantly comes home when Collie asks to see him. Collie tells Terry that while he’s guilty of most of crimes that he didn’t kill one young woman that was pinned on him, and that he fears that a serial killer may be out there commiting more murders.

Collie has a long history of play mind games as well as being a homicidal jerkface so Terry doubts his brother, and his homecoming isn’t a pleasant trip down memory lane. He finds his family still reeling with the shock and shame of Collie’s crimes as well as other issues, and he’s still in love with the woman he skipped out on even though she married one of his best friends. As he tries to help his family pull the pieces back together and come to terms with his past Terry begins looking into the possibility that Collie is telling the truth about another killer.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about the late Tom Piccirilli, but while there was a lot I liked in this it also had a lot of elements that didn’t work for me. The idea of a guy raised by a family of criminals coming home and investigating a murder is a nice hook, and the writing is very solid overall. However, I had a lot of problems with the tone of the book.

As our first person narrator we spend the entire book with Terry’s angst, and that’s understandable to some extent. If this was straight-up character based crime fiction, like from a Richard Price type of ultra realistic story, then it’d be fine and Piccirilli kinda gets there. Yet it’s also got this kind of gimmicky criminal underworld thing that seems more like something that belong in a Richard Stark novel or a John Wick movie. There’s so much stuff like that from the way the whole Rand family is named after types of dogs to the descriptions of their house being stuffed with hidden spaces filled with loot from heists over the years. (You’d think a family of known thieves wouldn’t want a house filled with evidence of their crimes.) Again, if that’s what you’re going for and you put a criminal playing detective in that world then that’s a solid idea.

But trying to mix serious character drama with a guy brooding about his family and his regrets doesn’t sync up with a story about thieves who seem to have been imported from a pulp novel. Then you add in the serial killer story which gets pretty stupid and melodramatic in the end, and it just feels like a lot of scattered elements that don’t work well together.

It’s also possible that I’m still so creeped out from reading I'll Be Gone in the Dark a few weeks ago that I refuse to sympathize with a guy who breaks into people’s houses when they’re sleeping. Whatever the reason, this one didn’t live up to a strong start for me....more

Like the rest of the world I’ve gone Black Panther crazy after seeing the new movie, but aside from thinking he was pretty cGuess why I read this one?

Like the rest of the world I’ve gone Black Panther crazy after seeing the new movie, but aside from thinking he was pretty cool as a kid in the late ‘70s reading Avengers comics I wasn't all that familiar with T’Challa or Wakanda. So this seemed like a good place to start.

Sadly, it isn’t.

Getting an acclaimed writer like Ta-Nehesi Coates to do your funny book shows yet again that comics aren’t just for kids any more, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff that draws on African history and culture. The art does a nice job of immersing a reader in the world of Wakanda. So just as a comic book it’s pretty good on the surface.

However, the problem is that Marvel has done a piss-poor job at making their comics accessible these days. You’d think with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point that someone in charge would have realized that fans want to read more about these characters. Yet despite way too many reboots and retcons in the last ten years since Robert Downey Jr. put on the Iron Man suit they have failed miserably at cleaning up the continuity to the point that readers can pick up a book and know what’s going on.

This isn’t just limited to creating jumping-on points for new fans either. I’ve been reading Marvel off-and-on for going on 40 years now, I have the Marvel Unlimited subscription which gives me access to thousands of comics including newer stuff, and I have no clue what's been happening in recent years other than managing to slog my way through Secret Wars. (And that didn’t exactly help clear things up.)

That’s the problem here. This run of comics was released after Panther’s film introduction in Civil War and should have been a place for readers to start with or get reacquainted with T’Challa before his solo movie. Instead the story picks up after recent huge events have left Wakanda in serious trouble. I’ve read part of those stories, but even I wasn’t entirely sure of what was going on here. What chance would a kid picking up Black Panther for the first time have of making sense of it all? Plus, it doesn’t help that one of the best characters in the movie was killed before this book started. (But in true comic book fashion she is only mostly dead.)

So even though we’ve got a title with real potential the demands of continuity of the Marvel universe force all these other recent events into it instead of providing a clean starting point. It’s the dilemma of trying to balance all the history of these characters vs. trying to let new readers into the world. It’s such a problem that even though the MCU gave the Marvel comics about 14 billion reasons to streamline stuff it’s just never happened. I know one of the reasons I like the MCU so much is that it’s the only place I get stories about these characters these days where I understand what’s going on.

That’s the shame of this. I think if they’d have given Coates a mandate to do a soft reboot on Black Panther without worrying about fitting it into the aftermaths of countless crossovers that he might have hit it out of the park, but he was handcuffed by the same thing that makes new Marvel comics not a helluva lot of fun to read these days.

But hey! They’ve promised a new reboot with this Fresh Start thing that sounds like maybe they finally understand what they need to do. I’m sure they’ll get it right this time…….*cough*...more

They say to never judge a book by its cover, but if you show me a space helmet wiI received a free advance copy of this from the publisher for review.

They say to never judge a book by its cover, but if you show me a space helmet with a hole in the visor laying on the surface of the moon…..I’m gonna read that book.

It’s the year 2072 and Earth has just begun to recover from a global climate catastrophe. Part of that comeback has been based on using helium-3 as a fuel source, and since the moon has oodles of the stuff there are now large scale mining operations happening on its surface. When Earth was in trouble all the nations worked together to do moon mining at first, but now that things are getting better everyone is ready to get back into greed and power grabs.

Caden Dechert is the chief of a small mining crew who just wants to do the work and keep his people safe, but when some of their equipment is sabotaged the American government is more than happy to point the finger at a nearby Chinese base. As things escalate Dechert may be the only person who can head off a full scale war on the moon.

There’s a lot to like in this one. It’s got a realistic and gritty portrayal of a near-future tech on the moon as well as having enough hard science to keep things grounded and relatable. The setting is well established so that you feel like you’re walking the corridors of this cramped underground moon base as well as feeling the exhilaration and terror of doing long rocket assisted hops into pitch black craters. The plot is also good with the set-up of a pretty intriguing mystery which then becomes more of a conspiracy thriller as events unfold.

I also was intrigued with the character of Dechert who is an ex-military guy who had a belly full of all the wars that popped off when Earth was at its most desperate and fighting for scant resources so he got off planet. Going to the moon to get the hell away from most people is an attitude I can relate to these days.

There’s an incredible tightness and economy to the writing so that David Pedreira is able to set up a detailed sci-fi concept as well as telling a good story. In fact, it’s just a little TOO economical. It’s less than 300 pages, and even though I’m all for an author getting it done that quickly I found myself wishing for a bit more story which came across as a little rushed at times.

It’s a good sign when the worst you can say about a book is that it left you wanting more....more

I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And I like books by Ace Atkins.

Spenser iI received a free advance copy from NetGalley for review.

I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. And I like books by Ace Atkins.

Spenser is asked to look into a famous unsolved art heist, but since it occurred twenty years ago the trail is very cold and the museum people he’d be working for are couple of overbearing snobs guaranteed to be a pain in the ass. The only reasons to take the case are a five million dollar reward for the return of one particular painting, and that Spenser has been asked to finish the job by another private investigator who is dying from cancer. Spenser greatly respects this detective who spent years trying to track down the lost art, and if you know anything about Spenser you can probably guess that he cares a lot more about fulfilling this guy’s last request than the money.

While the heist was successful it was the work of clumsy smash-and-grab thieves, not a highly skilled Ocean’s 11 kind of crew, and there are rumors that the painting has been floating around Boston’s organized crime underworld for two decades. As Spenser looks for the long lost Gentlemen in Black he’ll find that the painting has left a bloody trail in its wake since it was taken off a museum wall. He’s also got competition in the form of another unscrupulous investigator trying to get the reward.

This is the seventh Spenser novel that Ace Atkins has done since taking over the series after the death of Robert B. Parker, and Atkins has long since proven that the he was the right writer for the job. He still has Spenser behaving very much like the guy fans have known and loved for years with the detective trying to solve the case while cracking wise as well as cracking heads, and there is plenty of eating and drinking and general banter along the way. Atkins has kept all those familiar elements while subtly refreshing the series by not being afraid to incorporate some changes in the lives of Spenser and his supporting cast.

Most of that updating this time comes in the form of Vinnie Morris. Vinnie has long been one of Spenser’s ‘good’ criminals who is an occasional ally, and as he’s done for others in the series Atkins adds some depth and personality that makes Vinnie more of a unique character than just another version of Spenser with a few differing surface traits. While Hawk is off in South America on one of his secret missions (And I really want a spin-off series about Hawk’s adventures.) Vinnie more than fills the role of Spenser’s back-up buddy here. Atkins also now has the confidence to add some Southern touches with Spenser making his versions of a few country style dishes as well as taking a trip to Memphis where he gets some barbecue and works in a few Elvis references along the way.

The story was obviously inspired by the real heist of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, and it’s a juicy concept of a case with plenty of good twists and turns. We also get a lot of fun interactions of Spenser irritating all kinds of unpleasant people from an angry police captain to a murderous mobster to a snooty stuffed shirt on the museum board. Overall, it’s another remarkably solid outing that most fans of Spenser and PI novels in general would enjoy....more

I'd heard about Michelle McNamara befo**Update 4/26/2018 - When this book was published it was an unsolved mystery. It got a happy ending yesterday.**

I'd heard about Michelle McNamara before I even knew her name or that she was a true crime writer. She was married to comedian/actor Patton Oswalt, who I’m a big fan of, and several of his bits over the years have involved his wife. Per Patton’s descriptions in his routines she was a brilliant woman, far smarter than him, who was always operating at a whole other level.

Now I know what he was talking about after reading this book. It’s about a pure monster that should be one of the best known unsolved crime cases in American history, but many people have probably never heard of the Golden State Killer. It began in 1976 with a serial rapist terrorizing the suburbs of Sacramento. His MO was to break into homes in the middle of the night and surprise sleeping victims who he’d threaten with knives or guns. He often targeted couples or families and would rape a woman while her husband or boyfriend was tied up helpless in the next room. He’s also believed to have shot and killed a couple who had the misfortune to encounter him while out walking their dog.

His attacks spread to communities outside of San Francisco, but seemed to stop in mid-1979. Unfortunately, GSK had just moved south to the LA area where he started up again, but his first known attempt was thwarted when the couple fought back, and he narrowly escaped capture. Instead of scaring him off this triggered an escalation after which GSK would kill those he attacked until stopping in 1986, ten years after he began.

The full extent of the damage he’d done wasn’t known until DNA typing of cold cases was done in 2001. This confirmed what several detectives in various jurisdictions had suspected for years. The man called the East Area Rapist (EAR) during his crime spree in northern California was the same man who’d become known as the Original Night Stalker (ONS) in the southern part of the state. The statistics of his victims alone are staggering with 45 women sexually assaulted and 12 murders, and those are just the ones that are confirmed. He may have also been responsible for a series of break-ins in Visalia a few years earlier, and if so there’s another murder to hang on him there for shooting a man who stopped an intruder from abducting his daughter in the middle of the night from their home.

It was Michelle McNamara who branded him the Golden State Killer after she began writing about the case on her blog and in magazine articles. She had became interested in true crime as a teenager after an unsolved murder of a young girl happened near her home. A big part of this story is about how this case came to obsess her, and she does not make an attempt to gloss over how much it took over her life. She has one story of asking her husband to leave a movie premiere party because of a new lead she was given that she couldn’t wait to get back to her laptop to start working on it. There’s another heartbreaking moment when she describes an anniversary dinner with Patton where she realized that not only had he given her gifts two years in a row based on her on-going work on GSK, but that she had been so consumed that she’d forgotten to get him anything at all.

Unfortunately, Michelle died unexpectedly in 2016 while in the middle of writing this book. Two of her fellow researchers finished it at Patton’s urging, and I’m incredibly glad that happened because it would have been a shame if the work she did on this hadn’t been revealed so fully.

She was an incredibly gifted writer who can provide detail about GSK’s crime in such a way that we feel the full weight of what he did, and how incredibly scary this story is. It’s there as she details the evidence the police found that showed that GSK was a relentless night prowler who crept over fences, through backyards, across rooftops, and peeped windows from the shadows. It’s in the way she tells us the stories from the victims who were very often sound asleep in their beds and were awoken by a man wearing a ski mask shining a light in their eyes, showing them a knife, and telling them that he’d kill them if they didn’t do exactly what he said. While it never feels exploitive she conveys all the ways that the surviving victim’s lives were changed by the attacks on them. When she describes a detective’s years of chasing dead ends you can feel the frustration, and when she tells the story of a new lead you also start tapping into the hope that this might be the one to break the case.

In addition to being a great writer Michelle was a relentless researcher. I sometimes have issues with books or documentaries about true crime cases because I think it too often it shows confirmation bias or prefers wild conspiracy theories to more likely mundane facts and scenarios. She avoids those by imposing clear and logical standards to this which depended on fact checking and interviews rather than indulging in hunches or pet theories.

It’s very clear from what she wrote here that Michelle believed that this case could be solved with technology. The cops have the DNA of the Golden State Killer to use as the ultimate determination of guilt or innocence. Geo-Mapping his crime scenes should give an approximate location of where he lived. Scanning old case files and using key word recognition and data sorting can bring previously hidden connections to life. DNA databases are growing all the time, and all it takes is one hit from a relative to narrow it down to the family.* Michelle was convinced that GSK’s identity was in the existing evidence somewhere, and it’s just a matter of sifting through all the clues to find it.

Because of her death there several parts that rely on her early drafts, notes, old magazine articles, and even a tape she made of the conversation between her and a police detective while showing her some of the GSK’s crime scenes. That gives the book a bit of a disjointed feeling and makes you wish even more that she’d been able to finish it herself, but considering the circumstances it’s unavoidable and doesn’t prevent the full story from being told.

This will be going on my Best-of-True-Crime shelf, right next to In Cold Blood. And if they do ever catch the Golden State Killer I’ll bet it’s going to be due in no small part to the work of Michelle McNamara.

Caleb Ross is a high school student in a Texas town near the border which his father,To put this book into cowboy terms - it was more hat than cattle.

Caleb Ross is a high school student in a Texas town near the border which his father, the sheriff, rules by playing the classic western lawmen. However, Caleb knows that his father has a secret sinister side, and that he may have killed Caleb’s mother who he claims abandoned them both. New deputy Chris Cherry is a former football hero who has just returned home after an injury ended his playing days, and both he and his girlfriend are struggling to adjust to the situation. When Cherry investigates a body found in a shallow grave Caleb is positive that it’s his mother.

This starts a series of events that involve others in the town like the drug addicted and crooked chief deputy, a beautiful classmate of Caleb’s, a substitute teacher with a huge skeleton in her closet, and a deadly cartel hitman who has far more bodies to his credit than candles on his birthday cake.

This started off very strong rural crime novel with some good writing done that establishes all of the characters while giving us their viewpoints. The setting is also very well done so that you get the vibe of this desert town that’s a stone’s throw from the drug violence in Mexico. I was really into it for the first third of the book and thought it was going to be a next level book.

Unfortunately, it seemed to get stuck in a rut at the midway point and just keep going over the same old ground again and again. This was the debut novel from author J. Todd Scott, and it almost seems like he didn’t quite trust himself enough to think that he’d gotten the point across with the characters so that he felt the need to keep telling us about them when he’d already established everything we needed to know. It’s over 400 pages but could have easily been tightened up to around 300 without losing any of the richness of the better parts.

It’s one of those that’s not a bad book and had a lot of things I very much enjoyed, but the early expectations might have hurt it for me when it didn’t quite reach the heights I was hoping for. I also see that the sequel to it is even longer which makes me worry that it might suffer from similar problems. Still, Scott is a talented writer, and I’d be willing to check out more of his work someday....more

Rebellion sympathizers on a planet are being starved out by the Empire. Luke and Leia hatch a pAnybody know how to hotwire an Imperial Star Destroyer?

Rebellion sympathizers on a planet are being starved out by the Empire. Luke and Leia hatch a plan to hijack a Star Destroyer so they can use the massive ship to run the blockade and bring relief supplies to them. Stealing the ship turns out to be the easy part as they try to run the damaged vessel with a minimal crew, and an elite squad of Stormtroopers led by Sgt. Kreel have a plan to take the ship back and capture some valuable prizes in the process. Along with that we get another tale from the journal of Ben Kenobi about how he once faced the Wookie bounty hunter Black Krrsantan and lived to tell about it.

Kind of a mixed bag here. The idea of the good guys space jacking a Star Destroyer is a cool one, and that story has a lot of great stuff although I question going to all the trouble of stealing an Imperial ship and not doing anything other than using it for anything other than a battering ram. It’s also fun to see a young Leia, Han, and Luke doing regular-degular missions for the Rebels. My favorite part of the collection was the side story about Kreel’s squad of Stormtroopers taking out a city occupied by Rebels forces because we get to see somebody in the Empire besides Darth Vader be good at their jobs for a change.

The problems once again come when because these are prequels and so we know how things ultimately turn out as well as that certain things can’t happen. The worst of this is the Kenobi story because once again he’s trying to do stuff on Tatooine without giving away that he’s a Jedi because we KNOW that he just hid out there on the down low while Luke was growing up. That’s extremely limiting. The other thing I didn’t care for was all the bickering between Han and Leia because we all know that it’s because they’re in love, but they can’t acknowledge it because it doesn’t happen until Empire Strikes Back so we’re stuck in this zone which even one character acknowledges is extremely irritating.

There’s good stuff here, but just the nature of when this story takes place kind of handcuffs the whole thing....more

Gary and Beth Foster are a nice couple who truly love each other, and their ideaI received a free advance copy of this for review from the publisher.

Gary and Beth Foster are a nice couple who truly love each other, and their idea of a good time is playing Scrabble or watching Netflix. They don’t have a lot of money, but they’re happy just being together. Now that Beth has finally gotten pregnant after years of trying they feel like things couldn’t get any better. Which is exactly the point when life tends to kick nice people in the junk.

After Beth collapses while out shopping she’s quickly diagnosed with a particularly nasty brain tumor that will barely allow her to give birth before dying, but there’s a new procedure in Europe that might extend her life for years. Unfortunately, it will cost them $200,000 to try it, and they don’t have anywhere near that kind of cash. As hope begins to fade Gary receives a phone call with an offer for him to earn all the money they need. The catch is that he’ll have to murder someone to get it.

This debut novel from Tom Hunt is the kind of high concept hook that has put many a book on the best seller list and sold a lot of tickets to movies, and there’s a reason for that – it works. Or at least it works when there’s some talent behind the idea, and there’s definitely talent here. Hunt’s got a way of laying it all out in the straight forward fashion that many a crime writer has, and he’s also got the knack of making that style compelling.

There’s two things that really stood out for me. First, is that there’s a good amount of time spent on the efforts that are done by Beth and Gary with the help of their friends and family to come up with the money. They put pleas on the internet, hold events like hot dog dinners, and tell their story to the media all as part of the desperate fundraising only to realize that after all that it's not even close to being enough. It’s a bleak portrait of how Americans often have to resort to glorified begging to get medical treatment.

The other part is the story of Otto, the man asking Gary to commit a murder for hire. Otto is a ex-con who runs a pawn shop as a front for his real business of dealing drugs, and he’s got a huge problem that has made him desperate enough to try and use an average guy as a killer. We get Otto’s story told in parallel, and his criminal underworld couldn’t be more different than Gary’s suburban life. The contrast between the two is well done and underlines the desperate measures that both men feel driven to even if they have nothing else in common. On the downside Gary’s bland niceness is too much at times, and his hand wringing about the morality of murder does get a little old after a while. It was never enough to completely take me out of the story though.

What seems like an airplane read on the surface takes turns that ultimately make me think of this of outright noir. It’s solid crime story, and I’ll certainly check out what Tom Hunt does next....more

Velvet comes to Washington D.C. as part of her effort to clear her name and expose the conspiracy that set her up. To do this she’ll need to blackmailVelvet comes to Washington D.C. as part of her effort to clear her name and expose the conspiracy that set her up. To do this she’ll need to blackmail Gerald Ford and kidnap Richard Nixon.

And I thought Jason Bourne was dangerous.

I gotta admit that I was a little let down by this one. Velvet is still an awesome character as a middle-aged lady spy kicking ass, and the artwork continues to be top notch as we see her get into a variety of situations that would make great action scenes in any blockbuster movie. Yet as we wrap things up the plot starts to collapse under the weight of it’s spy-vs-spy machinations with so many betrayals and twists that even John le Carre would need a flow chart to keep track of all of it. Frankly, I’m still kinda confused as to why the entire thing happened to begin with.

The ending also seems to indicate that there will be more Velvet at some point, but it hasn’t happened yet so it’s kind of unsatisfying. Although I guess there is a TV series in development so maybe that’ll motivate Ed Brubaker to return to this at some point.

Still, the three volumes that made up this story were some great comics that were well worth reading, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed that we see Velvet return in a slightly more coherent story someday....more

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some seemingly law-abiding citizens stumble across sI received a free copy of this for review from NetGalley.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Some seemingly law-abiding citizens stumble across something valuable and decide to keep it even though they know it will be dangerous to do so. Oh, you have heard it? Yeah, it’s been around a while.

Zach is a former NFL player turned television announcer, and Steve is his old friend and investment manager. They take an annual hunting trip to Montana where their buddy Curt acts as their guide while they camp in the woods. The guys are having trouble enjoying their vacation since Zach has run up huge gambling debts in Vegas and needs cash quickly while Wall Street shenanigans have wiped out the savings Steve was managing for him. This has also put Steve into a very deep hole that might ruin his family.

Zach comes across the crash of a small plane with hundreds of kilos of cocaine in it, and Steve immediately seizes on the idea of taking drugs and selling them to as a way of getting out of their mutual financial crisis. Because there’s no chance that an organization capable of filling a plane with millions of dollars of drugs will ever come looking for it, right?

Despite Zach’s reservations they haphazardly start a scheme that involves keeping the secret from Curt. Things escalate quickly. Mistake piles upon mistake. And just like that Zach and Steve are in deep trouble and soon realize that they can’t even trust each other anymore.

The trope of an ordinary person finding a bag of money or drugs which takes them straight down the path to hell is one I generally appreciate. However, this one seemed pretty clichéd. It starts out with a very similar set-up to Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and then quickly morphs into an attempt at doing something like Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. (And those are two way better books I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing.) From there we cycle through all the checkpoints you’d expect to cross. You’ve got your ruthless enforcer from the drug cartel, a dedicated cop, some innocent people getting screwed over, etc. etc.

There’s also the odd way that it veers into social commentary and existential angst. Many a good crime novel includes these elements, but the writing here just seems to swing wildly from following the plot to going off on tangents about the environment, the perils of capitalism, and the way everyday life can chip at the soul. Those are all subjects that can easily and naturally pop up in a book like this, but the way they’re presented here often seems clumsy and ill-timed.

The most original aspect are the characters of Zach and Steve. The set-up leans in the direction of treating the football hero Zach as the good guy led astray by the fast talking Steve, but we get a more interesting perspective as we learn more about them. Zach is actually more of a hypocrite and selfish guy then he first appears while Steve isn’t quite the Wall Street d-bag you’d assume from the beginning. The way they almost accidently create an escalating mess is a great depiction of how quickly things can fall apart for someone once they decide to cross the line.

Despite its shortcomings I’m still a sucker for these kind of crime stories, and there was some very good character work done as well as some nicely atmospheric stuff that takes us from the snowy woods to the streets of Las Vegas. It’s not bad, but I can think of several better ones....more

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips churn out so many excellent comics that I managed to completely miss that they did this one which was absolutely ‘criminEd Brubaker and Sean Phillips churn out so many excellent comics that I managed to completely miss that they did this one which was absolutely ‘criminal’ of me.

(Yeah, I know. I apologize for that one.)

We’re back with the Lawless family in the ‘70s as Teeg spends some time in jail reading comics and killing inmates who are trying to cash in on the price that’s been laid on his head for some reason. Once released Teeg takes his young son Tracy on a road trip during which Teeg is hunting people while Tracy is on the prowl for a particular comic.

As always the crime story and art here are top notch, but the extra treat is that we get to read bits of the ‘70s style comic magazines along with Teeg and Tracy. Teeg’s story is about a Conan style barbarian with all the nudity and violence that era’s black & white mags could offer while Tracy is reading the adventures of Fang, the Kung-Fu Werewolf. And now I really want Brubaker and Phillips to actually do a whole run of that title because who wouldn't want to read a comic about a kung-fu werewolf?...more

2017 was a garbage fire of a year. I’m talking about a disgusting trash pile filled with old tires, dirty diapers, and toxic chemicals that was soaked2017 was a garbage fire of a year. I’m talking about a disgusting trash pile filled with old tires, dirty diapers, and toxic chemicals that was soaked in motor oil. Once it was lit the smoke burned the eyes and skin of anyone nearby. It seemed like that was going to also be how my reading went too although there were some late surprises that salvaged it.

Disappointment was a big theme because several of my favorite authors came in with efforts that didn’t seem up to their usual quality. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. had a lot of the stuff I usually like from Neal Stephenson, but it just didn’t do it for me like he usually does. It was a bad time to try and make a murderous dirty cop the sympathetic lead of a novel which was my biggest hang up with Don Winslow’s The Force. Stephen King teamed up with his son Owen for Sleeping Beauties which was another book that I shrugged my way through. The most crushing letdown was Since We Fell from Dennis Lehane because I didn’t think he was capable of writing a bad book, but he proved me wrong with that one.

On top of being underwhelmed by some of my favorite writers I read I also had the misfortune to stumble into reading Not Alone by Craig Falconer which was one of the worst books I’ve read in years. That was back in February, and the thought of it still makes my blood boil. I was also profoundly disappointed with my first book by Meg Gardiner who I’d heard a lot of good things about it, but her UNSUB was everything I hate about serial killer thrillers.

Not everything sucked because some of my most reliable authors came through as usual. Ace Atkins kept to his two book a year schedule with Little White Lies and The Fallen and did some of his best stuff with Spenser and Quinn Colson yet. Another guy delivering two new books was John Sandford who shook up his old Lucas Davenport formula with Golden Prey and then followed that up with another strong entry in his Virgil Flowers series Deep Freeze. (I also made a road trip to meet Sandford at a signing so that was one of the highlights in my book year.)

In addition to those Johnny Shaw also added to his on-going Jimmy Veeder fiascos with the fun Imperial Valley. On the sci-fi side of things The Expanse series continued to grow as an obsession for me with the release of the second season of the TV show based on the books, and the excellent new one Persepolis Rises.

One sub-genre that really paid off this year was noir. I finally got around to trying Ross Macdonald with The Moving Target as well as Dorothy B. Hughes’ In A Lonely Place. Hard Case Crime also gave me a couple of winners with An Easy Death which was a nifty little heist novel from Daniel Boyd as well as unearthing the previously unpublished last book of James Cain, The Cocktail Waitress. Probably the best old school hard-boiled crime drama I read this year was the graphic novel The Fade Out from the dynamic duo of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.

I also had some good luck trying new authors like the strange and compelling The Ready-Made Thief from Augustus Rose, and The Blinds from Adam Sternbergh.

Jonathan Moore was the author who made me happiest this year. I’d previously read THE POISON ARTIST from him and liked it a lot, and finsihing up the rest of that trilogy this year was fantastic. (It’s a trilogy in a very loose sense. Each can easily be read as a stand-alone novel.) Both The Dark Room and The Night Market were great books that crossed over a couple of genres. I was so jazzed on those that I gave his earlier novella Close Reach a try and got a terrifying horror/survival story that was also among the best things I read this year.

So even though there was a lot of books that I was less than enthused about there was still enough good stuff sprinkled throughout the year to keep it feeling like a total loss.

If this book actually were a cocktail you’d probably find it was pretty smooth going down, but think that it’s not all that strong while drinking. TheIf this book actually were a cocktail you’d probably find it was pretty smooth going down, but think that it’s not all that strong while drinking. Then you’d be surprised by the twist you found at the bottom of the glass, and when you tried to stand up you’d fall over and realize that you were completely shitfaced after all.

Joan Medford is burying her husband, but since he was an abusive drunk she isn’t exactly upset that he crashed and burned in a drunk driving accident. However, he’s left her stone broke, and his sister is using Joan’s inability to provide for her small son Tad as an excuse to have the kid stay with her as the first step towards claiming custody of him. Desperate for cash Joan takes a gig as a scantily clad cocktail waitress in a lounge where her looks draw the attention of plenty of male customers including the rich but sickly Earl K. White who starts dropping huge tips on her. Joan quickly sees an opportunity to help her get her son back if she can make White fall for her, but she’s torn between working towards that goal and her attraction to a handsome rogue named Tom Barclay. She’s also got a problem with a pesky policeman who thinks that she was somehow responsible for his husband’s death.

This is one of those Hard Case Crime offerings where they’ve dug up some unpublished treasure, and this time it’s from noir master James Cain. Cain wrote and rewrote multiple versions of the novel until his death, and it’s a helluva interesting and tricky read. You can see elements of his best known books like Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, but what’s interesting here is how he’s almost subverting his previous work by heading down similar paths yet still making The Cocktail Waitress something different.

It’s a subtle thing, and a good portion of the book just seems to be this hard luck woman struggling to overcome her circumstances and people’s perceptions of her. The police and her husband’s family think she might be a killer. Many people assume that she’s willing to flirt and flash some cleavage for tips, and maybe even do more than that. When she gets into the relationship with White it seems like a classic gold digger scenario. And yet the first person narration that Joan gives us make it seem like she’s just a decent practical woman trying to do her best to improve her situation enough to make sure she gets her son back.

The great thing about the writing here is that by the end you’re still sympathizing with Joan until the point where you look back and realize that there’s a whole lot of fishy stuff in her story. Is she an unreliable narrator who has been feeding the reader a line the entire time? Are we just as big of suckers as the rubes that Joan works for tips? Or is it really just a string of bad luck that is making Joan look bad, and she is just trying to set the record straight as she claims?

Those are the kind of questions you’ll find yourself asking, and it’s the way that Cain made Joan come alive as a character so that you’re not entire sure that makes this a fresh approach to a classic noir story....more

Anyone who has ever endured a long car ride or had to cool their heels at an airport because of a flI received a free copy from the author for review.

Anyone who has ever endured a long car ride or had to cool their heels at an airport because of a flight delay has wished that we had the technology to just teleport people from place to place like they did on Star Trek. After reading this they’d be more hesitant to step up on the transporter pad.

It’s the 22nd century and the world now relies on technology like teleportation. People and goods can be shifted anywhere on Earth in the blink of an eye. Joel Byram is a guy who spends most of his time playing video games and waiting for his more successful wife Sylvia to come home. Sylvia is an engineer for the company that controls the teleportation technology, but her long hours and company secrets are taking a toll on their marriage.

Joel is the victim of an accident while teleporting to meet Sylvia, and the result is that there are now two Joels in the world. This threatens to expose a horrible secret at the heart of the teleportation industry, and both Joels find themselves on the run from a corporation more powerful than any government as they try to save themselves and Sylvia.

This one is a bit of a mixed bag. It had a lot of things I liked very much from well thought out world building that creates a society based on future tech that seems logical and real. There’s also a bit of real science and physics mixed in so that it doesn’t seem like hand waving nonsense, and the writing has a nice style to it that walks the line between making it too deep to be fun but not treating the reader like an idiot either.

However, it’s got several things that irked me and dragged it down to the three star level. First, it’s got an underachieving smart-ass protagonist who we’re supposed to root for just because he’s not outright evil, and I’m just tired of that trope. Add in the fact that he’s got an attractive wife who is way smarter than him so it’s just like a million sitcoms and Adam Sandler movies that is supposed to appeal to that male geek wish fulfillment that it’s possible to outkick your coverage and snag a hot wife with a great job just by being a charming slacker while not having to change in any way or show any ambition of your own.

This plays right into the second thing that I didn’t like because I’m not a fan of vast conspiracy stories that have a hapless hero who doesn’t actually have any skills or knowledge that move the plot forward. Yes, Joel is able to do a form of hacking on apps because his job is teaching AIs how to think creatively, but he accomplishes this by just being a smart ass to machines so again that’s not anything that makes me think he should be able to survive this.

Instead Joel is just bounced from situation to situation where people then tell him what’s going on. He has no real agency of his own, and he also does another thing I hate which is to just react repeatedly with extreme emotion and no rational thinking. Yeah, your wife is in danger, but just running around like a maniac with no ideas of what’s going on or how to get her back just reinforces that he’s a simple baby man who charges in blindly and should be killed about twenty times over yet somehow he muddles through.

There’s also some unnecessary ‘80s nostalgia laced through with Joel’s love of old pop songs. It didn’t add anything other than trying to tap into the Ready Player One trend. I also wasn’t a huge fan of the very end, and the main secret at the heart of the book is a concept I’ve seen other places so it doesn’t seem as shocking or original as it should.

Despite these reservations I still kinda liked this book. That’s because it does have some genuinely clever stuff in it, and the writing was good enough to make Joel a sympathetic hero even if he’s pretty much everything I hate in a lead character these days. All in all it’s a solid debut sci-fi novel, and I’ll be interested to see what else Tal Klein comes up with....more